Maybe this already exists. But couldn’t one theoretically create a world within a world that is like the Net we all knew and loved before it was enshittified? I know the wayback machine exists, but I was thinking something that is still alive. IRC chats, forums, flash games (maybe not, with security concerns…), video sites that didn’t suck absolute ass like Corptube, stuff like that.
If it does exist, I am sure this would be the place to find it! Or maybe is a matter of staying off of all modern corp sites. I don’t know. Maybe Lemmy is this fantasy world…
IRC still exists. Forums are somewhat hard to host nowadays because lots of governments have passed laws imposing more and more regulation, liability and duties of care on operators of web platforms. We would need to start movements to repeal those laws first, I’m certainly in favor of that! But I think the future of forums is nonetheless ActivityPub; it is a lot better to be able to read about all topics that interest me on one website rather than having to click through many different ones.
Flash games: why do you want those back? Flash is a proprietary platform and it’s a good thing we can now do the things we used to do with it directly in the browser with HTML5 and JS. You can still play Flash games with Ruffle, there are still websites out there that host them.
Video sites that aren’t YouTube: nowadays videos can be much more easily hosted elsewhere than YouTube than was the case in the 2000s. Many social media platforms allow direct upload of videos and any website operator can easily directly embed a video without needing either YouTube or something based on Flash Player. So I’m not sure what you’re nostalgic for when it comes to this topic.
IRC is still alive and somewhat kicking on places like freenode, obviously a lot of that kind of culture lives in discord today, but you’ve also got matrix as an alternative to that style, but I can’t say I’ve really clicked with it myself.
A few forums have managed to hang around (not that I recommend it, but I discovered somethingawful is still around recently), and the software to run one is still out there being maintained. Reddit really did a number on these sites though so Lemmy, etc is probably a good tool in the box for this too.
Flash games are dead for a pretty valid reason (security, etc), but sites like newgrounds still have a presence for the kind of stuff you’re thinking of. I can’t say I’ve browsed it in a very long time though. You’ve also got the indie game scene that blew up in the 2010s—I personally feel like that’s scratching the same kind of itch for me at least. Places like humble and itch.io are good sources.